The actions to mitigate climate change lag behind the ambitions to limit the increase of the global average temperature by 2ºC. Socioeconomic challenges play an important role in slowing the progress of the low-carbon transition. However, while socioeconomic factors are pivotal in the low-carbon transition of the energy system, it is unclear how these factors quantitatively change the benefits and costs at national, organizational and individual levels. Here, I quantify the distribution of costs and benefits across time and space, and explore how the allocation of costs and benefits shape different stances toward the low-carbon transition. To address the socioeconomic challenges, I further examine how innovations in policy and technology enable politically and economically feasible pathways towards a low-carbon energy system. In the first chapter, I quantify the spatial distribution of stranded asset costs together with that of the GDP benefits stemming from climate change mitigation. To limit the average global temperature increase within 2°C, 95% of the global net benefits are shouldered by low and lower-middle income countries, while 90% of the stranded assets costs are borne by higher income countries. In the second chapter, I analyze the lifetime costs and benefits of climate change mitigation by age cohorts across countries under the Paris Agreement. My results show that the age cohorts born prior to 1960 generally experience a net reduction in lifetime net benefits. Age cohorts born after 1990 will gain net benefits from climate change mitigation in most lower income countries, while no age cohorts enjoy net benefits regardless of the birth year in many higher income countries. In the third chapter, I examine whether global transcontinental power pools address the unequal distribution of benefits and costs caused by heterogeneous resource endowments of renewable energy across countries. Employing an electricity planning model with hourly supply-demand projections and high-resolution renewable resource maps, I assess whether transcontinental power pools reliably meet the growing global demand for renewable electricity and concurrently reduce system costs. I find that transcontinental power pools enable renewables to meet 100% of future electricity demand, while also reducing costs by up to 23% across power pools. Transitioning to the next two chapters, I dissect socioeconomic barriers at the regional level, focusing on China. The fourth chapter quantifies the spatial distribution of health and employment outcomes of low-carbon electricity pathways in China. I integrate an electricity system planning model (GridPath), a health impact model (InMAP), and a multiregional input-output model to quantify China’s provincial-level impacts of electricity system decarbonization on costs, health outcomes, employment, and labor compensation. I find that disparities in health impacts across provinces narrow as fossil fuels are phased out, whereas disparities in labor compensation widen. Wealthier East Coast provinces reap the greatest benefits in labor compensation because of materials and equipment manufacturing, and offshore wind deployment. In the last chapter, I investigate whether the innovation of the hydrogen technology enables an economically feasible pathway in the low-carbon transition. I leverage an electricity planning model, GridPath, to quantify the cost implications of hydrogen penetrations, and further demonstrate how hydrogen interplay with other zero-carbon technologies and hard-to-abate sectors. I find that hydrogen reduces the cost of a zero-carbon electricity system by 16%, compared with a scenario without hydrogen. Apart from the role of long-term storage, hydrogen from the zero-carbon electricity system can be used to meet hydrogen demand in hard-to-abate sectors, while incurring a marginal decrease in the unit cost of energy demand. My dissertation reveals the socioeconomic barriers inherent in the low-carbon transition of the energy system, and calls for more actions to address the socioeconomic issues towards a sustainable energy system
